I want to live a green life, and for most of the years of parenting my four kids, I lead my family with a devoted environmental consciousness. In ways big and small, a decade of nursing four kids, cotton diapering, and family beds, my life style choices reflected deeply-held values. Food choices were equally deliberate, and, for a while, we even lived on a small farm and the kids grew up with goats and lambs. Along with these environmental choices, I also made the decision to allow my children to guide me in helping them find their passions. My role as their mother increasingly became the activity coordinator and well, driver to their variety of music, horse back riding, acting, art lessons and zillions of year round sports activities.

In the early years, as I drove in larger and larger circles around our community, I held fantasies of how all this driving and devotion to their development would pay off in college scholarships. As they grew and lost interest in one activity over another it became clear that the real benefit of all this driving around was in each of them finding some piece of themselves that made their lives meaningful.

But, each year it became more difficult to coordinate their activity schedules and figure out how I could drive across town to three or four different locations within twenty minute intervals. I justified the time I spent driving my kids as “our time together” and tried not to think about how frequently I filled up the tank. Yet, the stress of the scheduling and trying to sort out the routes occupied so much of my mind that I could barely focus on the time together. It wasn’t the kind of parenting that I imagined when I was making all the green choices that came so easy when they were little.

The gnawing doubts about my parenting choices and our driving lifestyle came to a head after watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Calculating the actual monetary costs of all those circles is mind-boggling even if I use only half of what employees get in their mileage reimbursement. What was worse than the close to 1000 gallons of gas per year that I was consuming in these concentric circles was the realization that I was producing 18,195 lbs of CO2 per year. Somehow in the practice of parenting, I got so busy accommodating everyone’s desired schedules that I lost touch with what I was trying to create in the first place.

I still don’t have the answer to this dilemma, but I have taken small steps towards re-establishing the balance between my kids expectations and our ever more essential environmental values. I have given up my time with them in favor of carpooling whenever possible. I limit the number of activities and sports each kid can participate in and I work hard to advocate for gaps in activities, for slowing down, even to experiencing boredom sometime so that they have the opportunity to discover themselves in quiet also. And thanks to this great job I learned about www.terrapass.com which is not only an incredibly easy site to help you learn about your own emissions levels but offers real solutions to helping deal with them.

Let me know how you have dealt with these issues in your family…